Chapter 10.
- Early married life. -- Boarding at the “Globe tavern.” -- a plucky little wife. -- Niagara Falls. -- the patent for lifting vessels over shoals. -- candidate for Commissioner of the land office. -- the appointment of Butterfield. -- the offer of territorial posts by President Taylor. -- a journey to Washington and incidents. -- return to Illinois. -- settling down to practice law. -- life on the circuit. -- story-telling. -- habits as lawyer and methods of study. -- law-office of Lincoln and Herndon. -- recollections of Littlefleld. -- studying Euclid. -- taste for literature. -- Lincoln's first appearance in the Supreme Court of Illinois. -- professional honor and personal honesty. -- the juror in the divorce case.
After the wedding of Lincoln and Miss Todd at the Edwards mansion we hear but little of them as a married couple till the spring of 1843, when the husband writes to his friend Speed, who had been joined to his “black-eyed Fanny” a little over a year, with regard to his life as a married man. “Are you possessing houses and lands,” he writes, “and oxen and asses and men-servants and maid-servants, and begetting sons and daughters? We are not keeping house, but boarding at the Globe Tavern, which is very well kept now by a widow lady of the name of Beck. Our room (the same Dr. Wallace occupied there) and boarding only costs us four dollars a week.” Gaining a livelihood was slow and discouraging business with him, for we find him in another letter apologizing for his failure to visit Kentucky, “because,” he says, “I am so poor and make so little headway in the world that I drop back in a month of idleness as much as I gain in a year's sowing.” But by dint of untiring efforts and the recognition of influential friends he managed through rare frugality to move along. In his struggles, both in the law and for political advancement, his wife shared in his sacrifices. She was a plucky little woman, and in fact endowed with a more restless
